18 Oct October

In this month’s newsletter we cover the purpose of the Health and Safety Law poster and two case studies in the courts, as summarised below:

• The Health and Safety Law poster explains British health and safety laws and lists what workers and their employers should do. If you employ anyone, you must either: display the health and safety law poster where your workers can easily read it or provide each worker with the equivalent health and safety law leaflet.
• A firm has been fined for causing employee exposure to vibration. Guilty pleas resulted from breaching Regulation 6 (1) and 7 (1) of the Control of Vibration Regulations 2005. Owners of Roywood Contractors, of Tilford Road, Tilford, Farnham, Surrey were each fined £1,150 and ordered to pay costs of £3,500 each at Basingstoke Magistrates’ Court on 20 September. Speaking after the hearing, HSE Inspector Leah Sullivan said: “This was a case of the company completely failing to grasp the importance of hand-arm vibration syndrome health surveillance. “If they had understood why health surveillance was necessary, it would have ensured that it had the right systems in place to monitor worker’s health and the employee’s condition would not have been allowed to develop to a severe and life altering stage.”
• A Chemicals company has been fined after releasing cloud of chlorine gas into factory – GEA Farm Technologies (UK) Ltd, based on Watery Lane, Warminster, Wiltshire pleaded guilty to breaching Section 2(1) of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and were fined £40,000 and ordered to pay costs of £22,000 at Basingstoke Magistrates’ Court on 4 October 2022. Speaking after the hearing, HSE Inspector, Malcolm Whyatt, said: “In this case several workers were put at risk from a cloud of chlorine gas which drifted uncontrolled through their workplace. “The company had previously designed their system to eliminate the possibility of human error, by reverting to a manual process they created a situation where mixing incompatible chemicals was possible. Chlorine can have severe health effects at very low levels, and they were fortunate that no-one was more seriously injured.”